All aboard for Milwaukee

The product management group I’m part of had its weekly “team” meeting yesterday morning. (And why are corporations so keen to use the word “team” when what they actually mean is “a bunch of people working for their own advancement, at cross purposes and without communicating with each other”?)

And one of the group, a part-time PM who’s evidently also part of the engineering group in Bangalore, informed the rest of us—including our manager—that a portion of the software operates in a particular fashion entirely unanticipated by us. Meaning, the developers decided to build the interfaces in this precise way, even though this is not how it was specified in the product requirements document. Meaning also that yesterday, three weeks before the entire highly-complex software-hardware-services product solution is supposed to be ready for what they call “first customer ship”, product management discovered this functionality for the first time.

For those of you unfamiliar with the world of product development (especially software products), this is like the Pullman porters deciding to steer a moving train to Milwaukee instead of Chicago, and bugger the whole concept following the actual rails.

But, as if that’s not whacked enough, our manager did not go ballistic. That’s like the train’s engineer just sitting back and filing his fingernails; maybe thinking about bratwurst, instead of throwing on the brakes and opening up a can of whup-ass on those porters.

The thing that worries me a lot is this: I’m responsible for collecting and prioritizing the feature requests, as well as writing the PRD, for the next couple of versions of this product. & not only do I feel as though I’m still going to be chasing a runaway train that’s already pulling out of the station—even though these people will have gone through two releases by mid-August and; should thus know better—I have no confidence at all in my manager’s capacity or will to grab the damned controls and be a bloody product manager.

Aside from which, we all look like groupers, flapping our mouths open and shut at meetings, discovering that the product we were supposed to have conceived, specified and driven is actually going to Milwaukee.